July 21st, 2021: Added support for bypassing Limit Submissions feeds when an entry is being edited.
April 8th, 2021: Migrated to Snippet Library. Added support for deleting Partial Entries.
This article requires the GP Easy Passthrough perk. Buy Gravity Perks today to get this perk plus 34 other premium Gravity Forms plugins!
Overview
If you have ever filled out a form anywhere on the web, you’ve probably wanted an easy way to edit the entry. It’s easy to skip a field, typo a postal code, or worse. Have you ever submitted a form with your own name misspelled? I have. It’s embarrassing.
The most common reason most forms don’t offer an edit option is that it’s complicated. Forms are typically designed for a simple task: capture user input one time. They often lack the capability to retrieve a previous entry, let alone make edits to that entry.
We’re going to show you an easy way to add that capability to any of your Gravity Forms with GF Easy Passthrough.
Using the Snippet
Prerequisites
Confirm that you have Gravity Forms and Easy Passthrough installed and activated and that you’ve installed the snippet.
Step 1 – Set Up an Easy Passthrough Feed
Navigate to the form’s Settings and click on Easy Passthrough to set up an Easy Passthrough feed.
Set the form as its own Source Form. All of the standard fields will automatically map because the source form and target form are the same form.
Step 2 – Configure the Snippet
Gravity Forms doesn’t include a built-in way to edit entries on the front end. This simple snippet will grab the last submitted entry ID (via Easy Passthrough) and use that to update the entry when the form is submitted.
To use it, update the form_id to your form’s ID.
new GPEP_Edit_Entry( array(
'form_id' => 179, // Set this to the form ID
'delete_partial' => false, // Set this to true to delete partial entries if enabled
) );The snippet supports Partial Entries. Set delete_partial to true to automatically delete any lingering partial entries when the updated entry is submitted.
Limit Submissions Integration
This snippet integrates with GF Limit Submissions to automatically bypass feeds when editing an entry. This is useful in a variety of scenarios, such as:
- An art contest where a user can only submit a single piece, but is allowed to edit it until the submission deadline.
- Adoption applications in which the user can apply to adopt up to 2 animals and can update their application at any time.
- Community-center classifieds where the user can list up to 3 items, but can update their listings until the items are sold.
Wrapping Up
If a visitor submits a form and navigates back to the form, Easy Passthrough will automatically pre-populate all of the form’s fields with the previous entry. Then, thanks to the snippet, the existing entry will be updated instead of creating a new entry.
Easy Passthrough uses a session cookie to pass data from one form to another. If that cookie is expired, it will not pass any data.
Help Us Take it Further
This is designed to work as simply as possible but there is a lot we could do from here. Tell us how you’d want to use this. We’ll collect your feedback and improve the functionality over time.
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I would like to have the user be able to edit some of the fields, but not all of them. Is there a way to conditionally hide the fields that the user cannot update? Situation: this is a registration for an event. People might want to change email addresses, addresses, etc., but we do not want them messing with payment fields!
Wishful thinking here — we are using GP nested forms. Would those appear and be editable on the screen as well? Thanks
Hi Donna,
You can use this snippet to save the EP Token into a hidden field on the form.
You can then trigger conditional logic to hide certain fields on the form when the hidden token field contains a value.
Nested Form fields are editable when editing entries via Easy Passthrough.
Would this allow a hash or key to be sent to users by email so they could go edit their entry?
Hi Simon,
You can include the link to the form with the EP Token, in the notification message of the form, that would be sent to the user after submission. The user can at any time use the link with the EP token to visit the form, which will be populated with the previously submitted data so they can edit it.
Best,
Hello, I have a question, I have one multipage form and one single page form with easypassthrough (single page form it’s just the first page of the multipage form), I need to update the multipage form via single page form, how I can do it?
If the single page form is passing values to the multipage form, you could use this snippet on the multipage form. They user would follow this workflow:
everything is just the opposite, there is a multi-page form that is filled out, after the user goes to his account and this multi-page form is displayed on different pages of the account and in the account I need to be able to edit the multi-page form User makes changes in single page form -> saves data -> multi-page is updated
I want to split a multi-page form into sections in the user profile
Hi, I would like the logged-in user to firstly see and then have the rights to edit Only All Products He/She submitted with the form. How can we achieve this?
Hi Aqeem,
You may want to checkout GravityView, which allows users to have access to all their submitted entries on the frontend and be able to edit them.
Best,
HELLO, Congratulations on an excellent article. How could it be a snippet that only allows you to fill out this form only once and if you want to correct for any error, only allow maximum to be edited only 2 times by the user? and not to show it again to the user ??? this working in a multisite installation. Grateful: RODOLFO SEALES POSADA
Hi Rodolfo,
You can use our GP Limit Submissions Perk to set a limit on the number of times a user can submit a form.
Best,
hi, I have follow up question. If a user has submitted multiple forms during a period of time. How can we show a list of those forms in the front-end, which the user can select and re-edit and submit again? Can we show this for instance in combination with your Better user activation or autologin add-on? Kind regards.
Hello Paul, We do have a tutorial found here on how a basic way on how to edit entries https://gravitywiz.com/edit-gravity-forms-entries-on-the-front-end/. If you are looking for a more robust solution, GravityView does offer a full suite for front end editing.
I do agree with all of the concepts you’ve presented to your post. They are very convincing and can definitely work.
Nonetheless, the posts are very quick for beginners. May just you please extend them a bit from subsequent time? Thank you for the post.
I have a job application form a user fills out and multiple pdf forms are generated from it. However if the same logged in user came back and went to the job application again i want all the fields to populate and then save as a new entry. This way new PDFs are created. This way the job applicant isn’t having to apply again and enter all their info. Is this doable?
Hi Kevin,
This should be doable using the tutorial above. Enabling the option to use the logged-in user’s last submitted entry, will ensure that the form is populated with the last submitted entry the user made. However, since you want to create a new entry for every submission made, you’ll exclude the snippet given in the tutorial.
In case you’re having difficulties setting it up, you can get in touch via our support form, so we can take a closer look at your form set up and further assist you.
Best,
Hi!
I have a following scenario:
I have a form with some fields ( for example: tracking id ( unique), name, email, address, position). It is to be noted during after the form submission name and email will not be submitted. There is another form with the fields tracking id, name and email. When a user needs to submit the second form he/she needs to put the same tracking id of the original form and with the new values for name and email fields. I want that when the second form is submitted the first form’s name and email fields of the same entry ( matching with the tracking id) is populated. No other fields will be updated like position and address fields.
Is it possible to perform this using gravity flow auto-populate and easy passthrough. Please explain how to do this?
I am a gravity flow customer.
Sorry! I am a gravitywiz customer that I wanted to say.
Hi Sheikh,
This should be possible with GP Easy Passthrough and GP Populate Anything but I’ve replied to your question via email so that you can send us an export of the forms.
Best,
Have a form where I’m using Populate Anything shortcodes— e.g. @{:6} —to populate radio button options from other radio button fields within the same form (works flawlessly). When trying this, I complete the form and all normal radio fields load with my previous entry, but the Populate Anything shortcode radio fields don’t “save”. They instead go back to the default state as if a new entry is being started. Is there a way to carry the shorcode selected Radio field along with all the rest?
Adding: the radio field only isn’t saved when reloading when the @{:6} selection is chosen.
Hey Brian, We noticed that you are a Gravity Perks license holder and have reached out to you via our support channel. Looking forward to assisting you with this one. 😃
Hey Ryan great post.
One quick question, if I want to apply this to all the forms, is their a way in doing so without entering where ‘gform_entry_id_pre_save_lead_XXX’ applies to all forms?
Sorry for my lame example, my knowledge is at a limited stage :)
Cheers Billie
Hi Billie,
To apply the snippet to all forms, remove the Form Id after the filter name, so it will be just “gform_entry_id_pre_save_lead”.
I hope this helps.
Best,
Thank you Samuel, works a treat :)
Samuel, a long shot question :)
Is there any way we can ‘select’ which past entry to populate? Any directional guide would be great…
Rgds Billie.
Hey Billie, Great question. With this tutorial, you would only pull in the most recent previous entry. If you wanted to select, you could use something like GP Populate Anything to populate all the previous entries from the user in a dropdown and allow them to select which one. Then with Populate anything, you would populate the choices based off the dropdown selection.
Does GP Easy Passthrough support repeater field of Gravity Forms?
Hi Henry,
GP Easy Passthrough currently doesn’t support the repeater field of Gravity Forms but it works with the GP Nested Form
Best,
Hello Ryan,
not sure I get this right. Your snippet to edit entries is based with Easypasstrough. But since I would like to modify a specific entry, I would use populate anything. Will your snippet above still work to edit entries? If so what do I need to do.
Thanks
Hi Mauricio,
I’m not sure I understand you correctly but are you looking to allow your users to edit entries after submission? If that is correct, then this Snippet with Easy Passthrough should work for you. What the snippet does is that it updates a matching existing entry instead of creating a new entry when the user resubmits the forms. You may also want to check out this snippet that populates form fields with existing entries, bypassing the entry_id via the URL Param and updates the entry on submission. I hope this helps.
Best,
I wonder if Easy Pass Through Feed + Populate Anything can be used in such a case:
Form 1 contains the fields: user’s email, name, number of points. And there is already a lot of data in it.
Now I would like to make a form in which the user, after entering the e-mail address, will show all entries from form 1 for this e-mail address. Additionally, the name and number of points fields will be automatically filled in. There can be a dozen or so such items. And now you will be able to modify the number of points for each entry separately.
Is it possible with these two plugins?
Hello Greg, This would be a perfect example. You can take the most recent entry and either pass it through using Easy Passthrough or use populate anything to create a single dropdown field that contains all the previous entries via a title or entry ID. When the user selects an option, all the field below are populated via the perk. A third option would be a dedicated plugin like GravityView which gives you full control over all the entries. 😃
Hi there
Suggestion to take this further
Notification Emails many a times may do not always go through, either due to an update in another plugin, or due to Email host issues of the sender or the receiver, or could be due to many other reasons or just that the user simply wants the notification again because he didn’t receive it. There is currently no solution to this provided by anyone – So the user informs the site owner (by email!) and the site owner navigates to the form and the entry and then re-sends the notifications (of course after a couple reminders :) from the user) using the backend admin – which is really cumbersome when there are many users who keep requesting the notifications on a regular basis for a zillion other problems they have
The Possibility of adding an option for users to be themselves able to Re-send ‘selected’ ( ie as allowed and set, by the site admin) notifications from the front end itself would be quite a problem solver for many people i guess. Because many a times notifications do not for several reasons get through always. This option could be given to the users on the confirmations page that appears after submitting the form. (Of course the admin should be able to select which notifications the user is allowed to re-send) In other words – the back-end button of re-send notification be made available. So we could say “Didnt Receive your email? Click here to Re-send it!”
Thanks guys for considering this.
“If a visitor submits a form and navigates back to the form, Easy Passthrough will automatically pre-populate all of the form’s fields with the previous entry. “
Here an option could be given – to simply resend the notification. So while the user sees (like – for his assurance – he doesnt want to change anything) but he just requests for the notification to be re-sent from the front end!, if thats possible
Hello Arvind, this is a great request. Technically you could create a page either with EasyPassthrough or Populate Anything where the user could return to a form and resubmit the form resending the notification. Let us know if something like this would work for you. 😊
ok. Yes that would work. I will try that especially with populate anything also thank you very much
Hi there,
Is the Entry ID field required for this to work? If so what field do you use for this, ‘Unique ID?
If you have multiple forms and want to use the Unique ID as an identifier what would you recommend to pass the Unique ID from one form to another? They are one after another and only accessible by logged in users.
Thank you, Tyler
Hello Tyler, I think the tutorial found here would be more along the lines of what you are looking for. That would require Gravity Forms Populate Anything. Let us know if that would work out for you. If you need further assistance with this one, please drop us a line through our support system. 😊
If I understand right this a new form which we link to the original form to change values, correct? Does this support pricing? I am trying to find a way to modify a form after submission and get the pricing to change. I use gravity forms for events, I often have users changing their mind on the selected activities and pricing could be involved. Currently, I can edit most value, but not the product fields. Thanks
Hello Mauricio, Great question. In this example, this is the same form passing the data to itself, so when a user returns to this form, it pulls up their previous data. With that being said, you can use this for a separate form as well if needed. As for the pricing, I have just tested this and you should be able to edit the product fields through Easy Passthrough.😊
Hi there, can I provide the possibility for users to edit everything that they have filled out on the gravity form my form is about 7 pages with so much conditional logic…
Hello Nima, this tutorial would be for more of a basic form setup. As explained, front end editing could get really complicated really fast. The multiple pages would be no problem and the conditional logic should not be an issue as you will be directly editing the same form. Of course, if you have a test site, you could test the configuration and see if you could get it to work for your liking. Another option would be to use a dedicated plugin such as GravityView to edit on the front end. If you do have a Gravity Perks license, you can always drop us a line and we could take a deeper dive into your form. 😃
Hi there. thank you for the great job. I have a question just to make sure I got it right and this is what I want. I have a very long gravity form (it includes 7 pages) which is for job applicants and their CVs. I was wondering how to provide the possibility of editing the CV and information they have filled out and update their information and CV in their account. is this my solution?
Did you get a solution ?
Hello Marie, Do you have a similar question? Let us know in a new comment. 😃
Hello Nima, you should be able to use this on a multipage gravity form. Unfortunately, EasyPassthrough does not support File Upload fields so you would not be able to update a new CV but all their information can be edited.
Hi!
A workaround to support FileUpload in EasyPassthrough would be to put the field in a NestedForm (another Great Perk from GravityWiz). That way the field will be editable.
How do i get this to work when the form is using GF’s User Registration feature? When I try to update a form, I keep getting errors flagging the username and email as already being used.